EP 95: How to Lift for Real Muscle Definition After 40

0:00Hello and welcome back to Becoming Her, Fitter, Better and Stronger over 40. I'm your host and coach Shauna. I am 47, a wife, a boy mom, and a fitness and nutrition coach helping women over 40 become their best. Welcome or welcome back. If you're over 40 and you are in the gym, you're lifting weights because you've heard that you should be strength training, but you're not seeing the definition or the changes that you hope for, it's likely because of how you are training. Just holding weights is not enough to guarantee that you're going to build muscle or change your body, and I say this from experience.

0:29I spent years in the gym but never really saw the changes that I wanted until I changed how I was training. I stopped using the gym to burn and I started to use it to build. So if you want more shape, more definition, a better body composition, and an easier time losing fat and keeping it off, building muscle matters. And to build that muscle, your training needs a few key things. You need a structured program that you stick to for weeks or months. You need to perform your exercises with good range of motion and control. You need enough intensity or weight to challenge the muscle. And you need to progressively ask your muscles to do more over time.

1:04And that last piece is called progressive overload. And it's what allows your training to keep giving your muscles a reason to adapt and grow instead of doing the same thing month after month and wondering why your body doesn't change. Today, I want to dive into progressive overload because it's such an important piece of continuing to build muscle and change your body and something that can feel confusing. I'm going to give you five simple steps to follow. and by the end of this you'll know exactly how to apply it so that you can see the changes that you want to. So let's get into it. Progressive overload sounds complicated but it doesn't have to be.

1:36Simply means that over time you are gradually increasing the demand that you're placing on your muscle. One of the biggest misconceptions is that progressive overload means that you have to continue lifting heavier. Adding weight is one way to progress but you can add reps, you can improve your range of motion, you can improve your control and execution. All of those are ways that you can add progression. And the goal isn't always just to increase weight. The goal is to get better at the movement and gradually ask more from your muscle over time. When you can consistently do that, that is what provides the stimulus to grow muscle.

2:05And having more muscle is what's going to help your shape, your definition, your metabolism, and all of the things that we want, especially after 40. So let's get into those five steps that are going to help you do just that. Step number one is you want to repeat your lifts. Progressive overload starts with consistency because you can't progress something that you're constantly changing. This is exactly what I talked about in my last video on why constantly changing workouts will slow your results. If you haven't watched that yet, I will link it below because these two videos go hand in hand. And you don't need to follow the same program forever, but you do need to follow a program long enough to get good at the exercise, apply progression, and be able to see if you're actually improving with your performance.

2:41With my own training and with my clients, we're not changing everything up every single week. We're keeping things the same for months so that we can apply that progression and get better over time. Now on to step number two, and that is to train hard enough. Now before worrying about adding reps or weight, we need to make sure that your working set is actually challenging enough to build muscle. Let's say you're doing 10 reps with 15-pound dumbbells. Then next week you do 11 reps. Now technically you did do more, but if you could have done 20 reps with that weight, those sets were not challenging enough to begin with.

3:10When we're training to build muscle, our working sets need to get close to failure, which means you're finishing a set with only maybe one to two reps left. A good way to measure this is by using something called reps in reserve or RIR. At the end of your set, you want to ask yourself, how many reps did I have left? That would be your reps in reserve. If you only had one to two reps left, that means you're working close to failure. But if you finish a set and you feel like you could have performed another five to six reps, then that wasn't challenging enough to stimulate muscle growth. And I think this is where I used to get tripped up too, is I used to underestimate what true failure actually looked and felt like.

3:46Because years ago when the set started to burn or it started to feel uncomfortable, my brain would say, okay, I'm done. And then I would stop. But that doesn't mean that the muscle was anywhere near to failure. If you haven't ever practiced going to failure, this is a good exercise you can do so that you can get a good concept of what that looks and feels like. What I want you to do is pick a safe isolation exercise, something like a bicep curl. Use a weight that you can control and start curling. And I want you to go until you reach the point where you cannot physically complete another rep. not when it starts to burn, not when it starts to get uncomfortable, not when you think you're done or your brain tells you you're done.

4:21I mean, until you physically cannot bring that dumbbell up to your shoulder. That's true muscular failure. And that's where we want to get close to when we are training. And when you get to that point, that is technically failure or zero reps in reserve, meaning you had no reps left that you could have performed. And that's true muscular failure. Now, Now, you don't have to take every exercise to true failure. The point of this is to calibrate your effort, because if you've never experienced true failure or zero reps in reserve, it's hard to know what one or two reps away from failure feels like.

4:53Once you practice this and you have felt what true failure feels like, you'll be able to have a much better reference point that you can bring with you into your training. Now, for your working sets, you want to be within about one to two reps shy of failure, sometimes closer depending on the exercise, which brings me to an important distinction that I want to make here. You know, a workout that feels hard and a workout that builds muscle are not always the same thing because you can go into the gym and sweat, be out of breath, burn a ton of calories, and not necessarily have done an effective workout when we're talking about building muscle.

5:23Building muscle requires that you are using the same program, progressively getting stronger, and making sure that you're using appropriate weight so that you are getting close to failure with your sets. Just make sure that you use the right intensity or weight so that you are actually challenging your muscles, and then over time you can progress. Now on to step number three, which is to add reps. Now we get into the simplest ways to add progressive overload, and that is by adding reps. So let's say you're working with a rep range of eight to 12 reps. So week one, you're doing an RDL with 35-pound dumbbells, and you get eight good reps.

5:55The week after that, you use those same 35-pound dumbbells and get nine reps. Then maybe the next week, you get 10, then 11, and then 12. That's progression. Your muscles are now capable of doing more work with the same load. And I really want to emphasize this because progressive overload does not always mean you need to lift heavier and heavier every single time you go to the gym. Sometimes one more quality rep is all you need to progress. But notice that I said quality rep because we don't want to add reps if it means that we have to shorten the movement, rush through our reps, bounce the weight, or let our form fall apart.

6:29We want to make sure that as we're adding reps, we are continuing to keep the quality of our movements, which brings us to step number four, and that is to improve the quality of the rep. Progress isn't always going to mean that you're adding reps or weight. Sometimes it just means that you are performing the exercise better. Let's say last week you did RDLs with 35-pound dumbbells and you got eight reps. This week, you got the same eight reps, but maybe you had better control. Maybe you had better range of motion. Maybe you had better mind-muscle connection, and maybe your overall technique was just better.

7:01Even though you didn't add reps or weight, you were still progressing because you were getting better at that exercise. Sometimes progression shows up in your workout log and sometimes it doesn't. It shows up in the quality of your reps. Now once you have your form dialed in, that's when you can move into our last step, which is to add weight. And this is our last step for a reason. You don't want to just add weight for the sake of it. You want to make sure that your form is good, that you are working to the top of your rep range, and then you can add weight. That is the way that you can progress safely and effectively.

7:30Like I said, once you have gotten to that top rep range, you have good execution, you have good tempo, you have good control, you can now start to add weight. But how you add weight also matters. Let's go back to the example of the RDL using 8 to 12 rep range. And you start with 35-pound dumbbells and you get 8 reps. Over time, you build your reps up. Now you're able to do 12 good reps. And that's when it's time to move up with your weight. And when you do, the increase doesn't need to be crazy. anywhere from like 2.5 to 5 pounds is ideal or simply use the smallest jump that your equipment allows.

8:03The goal is to add just enough weight to create a new challenge without losing your technique, control, or range of motion. If you go too heavy too fast it's likely going to impact your range of motion, your ability to perform the exercise well, and it's just not necessary. Small increments are all that you need.

8:24now once you do add weight let's say you go from 35 pounds to 40 pounds your reps will likely drop back down to eight and now you just work through that process again you start building all over eight becomes nine nine becomes ten and eventually you reach the top of your rep range and then you repeat the whole process and you can likely see with all of the things that we're talking about you know how much weight you're using how many reps you're performing how critical it is for you to track this because there's no way that you would remember week to week where you left off. So tracking is going to be key for you to be able to continue to apply progression and get the results that you want.

8:57If you're not tracking now, you can use something like a workout log. They have some on Amazon, but I want you to make sure that you are tracking your exercises, track the weights that you're using, track the sets, the reps. Then next week when you come back, you'll know exactly where you left off and where you need to improve. Something quickly I want to mention is that you're not going to progress every exercise every week. It's going to fluctuate, but we want to look at trends over time. One extra rep doesn't seem like a lot, neither does adding five pounds or just improving your form. But if you stack those improvements over six weeks, three months, six months or a year, now you're stronger.

9:33Now you're moving better. You're training more effectively and you're seeing the changes that you want because you gave your muscles, a reason to adapt, and time to grow. And that's where real transformation happens. That's how the women in my programs transform. They go from soft and stuck to sculpted and strong because they apply the principles that we just talked about. They followed a structured plan, they train hard enough, they improve their reps and their technique, and they add progression and stay consistent long enough to see real results. So if you are in the gym and you are working hard but you're not seeing the results that you want to, I want to invite you into my six-week program, Sculpted Season.

10:10You're going to get workouts that are programmed, exercises, sets, and rep ranges all laid out, progression that's built in. You'll track everything inside the app so you can actually see yourself getting stronger. There are home and gym options, plus my macro calculator, a protein guide, sample meal plans, weekly lessons, and I'll be inside the community throughout helping to encourage and motivate you. It's a one-time purchase with lifetime access. I will leave all of the information in the description. I would love to see you there. Thank you so much for joining me in today's episode. I genuinely hope you found it helpful.

10:42If you did, please leave a rating or a review. I would so appreciate it. And until next week, keep getting stronger, and I'll see you in the next episode.